Websites Crash

Because my website is being down for almost a month, I decided to take a moment and talk about website outages and why they happen. The truth is, every website crashes sooner or later.

Lets’ have a look at some major players: Facebook has “what do I do with my life right now” crashes. Twitter has Fail Whale crashes. The Department of Justice has Anonymous crashes. Google, Youtube, and Yahoo have all gone down. Their data misplaced, but eventually found. It might be brief or even while you sleep. Hopefully it doesn’t happen every single week. But every website crashes. Yours will too, if you have one.

Why Do Websites Crash?

There are endless reasons why a website could go down. There could be a problem in the code. There could be a problem with the server. There could be a cyber terrorist organization that’s spamming your site to prove a point to the world.

But why can’t websites be impervious to crashes.

Because things happen. Look at machines. Every machine requires downtime. Something breaks or they need maintenance before something breaks, or they get replaced with a new machine that still breaks despite being new. Unless someone finds a way to create a perpetual motion engine (which they won’t), machines need downtime.

And websites are no different (partially because they run on machines). You can set backups in place. You can take extra precautions. But with a list of a billion things that could go wrong, something is bound to succeed in bringing your website down sooner or later. Also, you need to factor in human error. People operate and update websites. People maintain the servers your site is hosted on. People, as wonderful as they are, make mistakes. All it takes is a brief lapse in judgment for everything to come crashing down….

How Do I Know if My Website Has Crashed?

If your site appears to have crashed, don’t panic just yet. First, check other websites and see if they are working. If they aren’t, then you’re probably having a connection problem on your end. Either that, or the machines have made their first move, cutting all of humanity off from their precious world wide web. If just your website isn’t working, it never hurts to try a different browser. You can also try a “hard refresh”. To do so, you either press Shift + F5 on Windows or Shift + cmd + R on a Mac. If you’ve tried all of these and your site still isn’t loading, it’s quite possible that your site has gone down.

What Do I Do if My Site Crashes?

Well, if you’re one of my provider’s clients, you contact them. That’s what there’re here for. If you’re not one of my provider’s clients, you’re out of luck. Your website is dead and gone forever. And you will never get any of it back.

Kidding, of course.

Your best bet would be to contact your hosting company. If you don’t know who your hosting company is, try and get a hold of someone who does. Though honestly, you should probably have some idea of where your website is hosted. It’s like knowing where your social security card is. You might not need it very often, but when you do, it’s very good to have it around. And if you don’t know where it is, well, that could be another large problem in itself. Once you find where it’s hosted and contact the host-er, someone should hopefully be able to help you out.

If website crashing is an inevitability, then the ability to get a site back up is arguably as important as keeping it from crashing in the first place. For example, when Facebook crashed last week, it was down for less than two hours. Considering how rare that site crashes, that’s some pretty small downtime. During the process, we also make sure to keep open communication with our clients. After all, websites are incredibly important to modern businesses. For some, a midday website crash is the equivalent of their store closing during peak business hours. That’s something nobody wants.

You know what everyone does want though? A great looking, affordable website!

This discount code can be passed on to friends / family / acquaintances or business relations to place an order with Oni. They can fill it during our order process and receive a 15% continuous discount on the entire order.

Well that was a personal choice. I now had the chance to clean everything up and rebuild my website from the bottom up. Hopefully you will find my new website worth the wait. It was duly a matter of making a virtue out of necessity. I will try to put back the “old” blogs as soon as possible.

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